I’m proud to share that a fellow instructor and I were awarded an Honorable Mention by the Alabama Bicentennial Committee to conduct a project with my Creative Writing students and her Photography students during the 2018 – 2019 school year. We will work together to use the Alabama Department of Archives & History’s Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection as a basis for comparison to explore the historically black Newtown community in north Montgomery. The students will learn more about documentary photography, oral histories, and historical narrative writing from the project, which will begin this month and continue through the fall.

In addition to that work, and unrelated to the Bicentennial Commission’s officially endorsed projects, my Creative Writing students and I are also slated to go to the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Museum and Memorial, to make our (mostly) annual trip to the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, and to conduct our annual Oakwood Cemetery “Speaking for the Dead” project. (There are also other projects and trips in the works, but those plans aren’t final yet.)